`Cops`: The Pathos And Humor Of An Often Dirty Job

Cops:

Their Lives In Their Own Words By Mark Baker

Simon And Schuster, 303 Pages $16.95

August 18, 1985|By Reviewed by George V. Higgins, A novelist who spent 16 years as prosecutor and defense attorney in Massachusetts.

The way I heard it in 1967, the Massachusetts state trooper had grown frustrated after months of watching the hood drive his Coupe de Ville serenely home after a hard day of breaking the law cleverly enough so that no one could get enough probable cause to secure a warrant and bust him. So the cop pulled him over and demanded to see license and registration, both of which the hood presented. Massachusetts drivers` licenses in those days were printed on thin cardboard stock. The cop tore the license in half and ate it. Then he arrested the hood for operating without a license in his possession, correctly anticipating that the judge presiding in the district court would not believe so preposterous a claim by the defendant, and got a conviction.

I thought that was a pretty good story. When I wrote ``Kennedy for the Defense`` 12 years later, I used it. A year after ``Kennedy`` came out in 1980, Paul Newman`s star turn in ``Fort Apache, the Bronx`` ratified my judgment while teaching me some manners--the story I had swiped from the cops for the book cropped up virtually unchanged in the movie.

Mark Baker traveled around the country for more than two years, interviewing cops for their views of their lives. Sure enough, on page 211, there is the license-eating story.

There are at least two ways of looking at the currency of this legend. The first is that license-eating is a practice prevalent among cops otherwise thwarted in their efforts to inconvenience evildoers, and the event not only happened but has passed into the sub rosa canon of unacknowledged police procedures. The second is that the veracity of the story doesn`t matter in the slightest because it is a good one, and if it isn`t true, it should be.

I endorse the second position. It seems to me that policemen tell such wonderful stories that they are all admissible as evidence of our common humanity (if not as proof in court) not as to the truth of the matters therein asserted, but as conclusive proof that the words were uttered and are absolutely absorbing.

That is the case with this book. Contributing his second volume (his first was ``Nam,`` recollections of the war in Southeast Asia by its American veterans) to the transcripts of national oral history most recently, regularly --and superbly--compiled by the estimable Studs Terkel, Baker has delivered a bushel of memorable cameos of pathos, foolhardiness, depravity, ragged courage, grief, instant genius and astonishing stupidity into our folklore. It doesn`t really matter whether New York or any other city ever employed a fat, alcoholic, mounted cop who never left the saddle when the sergeant was around (he spent his uniform allowance on refreshments, and the seat was out of his pants). It doesn`t matter whether such a thirsty officer ever dealt with the need for a drink while on duty--and the certainty of punishment if the horse was seen alone on duty outside of the tavern--by lowering the 1,700-pound steed into the saloon cellar on the sidewalk freight elevator. Nor is it germane to the reader`s interest whether in fact the beast died in the basement and had to be grappled out with a tow truck. What is significant is that the story was told, and it is hilarious.

Out of all those stories, as Baker has artfully assembled them, emerges a composite self-portrait of cops that ought to be included among materials presented in remedial courses offered to putative adults who do not know how to behave. The primary function of the police in our society is to clean up the results of earlier failures of the civilizing process--those of parents, chiefly--and deliver them to the appropriate governmental agencies for disposal (the morgues) or safekeeping (the prisons) when their inability to live peaceably in the community becomes generally intolerable. It is a perfectly hideous job, putting decayed corpses into rubbish bags and dealing with children battered insensible. Digging headless corpses out of the tangled metal left by head-on collisions is a wretched business, and busting hardworking hookers off the street is basically a waste of time. There is no fun in firing sidearms at targets that fire back; it`s dangerous, dirty work. Almost all of the stories that cops tell about the work feature themselves as victims. This is not entirely a manifestation of self-pity, although some of that is involved. It is largely, I think, an admission that they feel inadequate to discharge the responsibilities which society, without thinking too much about it, imposes on their shoulders. Day after day and night after night, they confront situations of such tragic complexity as to boggle the corrective efforts of the most resourceful planner with unlimited time and funds, and must react instantaneously to set things aright. They can`t do it. Nobody could do it. They deduce that they face the task for that reason: to be the designated incompetents, and take the resulting rap when their efforts fail.